A Roman emperor grovelling to a Persian king: the message behind a new statue in Tehran
A new statue in Tehran
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Tag Archives: politics
A church in Operation Midway Blitz
Mia and I left Windycon before 9AM on the morning of November 9. As we now regularly do, we went to St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in Evanston, where we had been members from 1977 to 1997. I immediately saw that the church was very full for the Twenty-second Sunday after Pentecost. The worship was as lovely as ever.
Cory Doctorow on Apple, Big Tech, and Smaller Tech
Following up on Cory Doctorow on Apple, Doctorow has written again about Apple in Plenty of room at the bottom (of the tech stack), the key point being:
Apple’s security model works well. To the extent that Apple is both benevolent and competent, it makes products that are safe and reliable. But this model fails horribly, because any time Apple decides to trade off its customers’ privacy, safety, or utility for its own priorities, those customers are rendered defenseless by Apple’s total control:
Steel Lobsters
Notes and quotes concerning Myke Cole, Steel Lobsters: Crown, Commonwealth, and the Last Knights in England
“The total time from the moment they donned their armor , to the battle that would see them pass into legend, was about a month. It was a bright, final flash of glory – like the sparkling sun on their polished metal armor – before winking out forever.”
China, Russia, and science fiction
Last month I read Ukraine Update June 14, which begins:
Russia has de-dollarized, and the yuan will now be the main trading currency for Russian citizens. China’s takeover is nearing completion.
This remined me of Robert Heinlein’s novel Sixth Column (originally serialized in 1941, first published in book form in 1949). Continue reading
The Forever War at 50
Notes from a panel at Capricon 44, Chicago, Feb. 2, 2024. Any mistakes are mine. The panelists are not responsible for any errors here.
Shaun Duke, Jerry Gilio, Bill Higgins, Benjamin Wallin, Gary K Wolfe (moderator)
Since its release in 1974, Joe Haldeman’s Hugo and Nebula Award winning novel The Forever War has been assigned in college classes and hailed as a profound exploration of the dehumanizing effects of war. Now on its 50th anniversary, our panelists look back on the novel’s release, its impact, and its relevance today.
The Dark Side of Gaia
I was reminded tonight of the Gaia hypothesis. It was quite a thing in the 1970s.
The Gaia hypothesis, named after the ancient Greek goddess of Earth, posits that Earth and its biological systems behave as a huge single entity. This entity has closely controlled self-regulatory negative feedback loops that keep the conditions on the planet within boundaries that are favorable to life. Introduced in the early 1970s, the idea was conceived by chemist and inventor James E. Lovelock and biologist Lynn Margulis.
This had a natural appeal in the early days of the environmental movement. I was skeptical back then, thinking of it as new age wishful thinking, and impossible to test. I was wrong: Its origins are far darker. Here is the abstract of Gas Guzzling Gaia, or: A Prehistory of Climate Change Denialism:
Continue readingMonday Night Irish Class, November 14, 2016
Irish Class, November 14, 2016
Rang Gaeilge, 14ú lá Mí na Samhna 2016
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Fadas: áéíóúÁÉÍÓÚ
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Dé Máirt seo caite
“Seachas an run sin, Mrs. Lincoln. ar thaitin an dráma leat?”
Seanfhocal
| banlámh | cubit | f |
| Is fearr banlámh den lá ná dhá bhanlámh den oiche. | It is better to start early than to work late. | Lit. “Better one cubit in the day than two cubits at night.” |
Nobody in the class had any idea how Irish folklore turned a unit of length (cubit) into an expression of time. Seems like relativity 🙂
Conquest
How the Romans really conquered Britannia. pic.twitter.com/ZpiGWKG1nl
— The Classics Library (@stephenjenkin) December 21, 2015
No, they were not predicting an ice age.
What were climate scientists predicting in the 1970s?
The fact is that around 1970 there were 6 times as many scientists predicting a warming rather than a cooling planet.
Their papers showed that the growing amount of greenhouse gasses that humans were putting into the atmosphere would cause much greater warming – warming that would exert a much greater influence on global temperature than any possible natural or human-caused cooling effects.
From Hilbert Space to Dilbert Space, and beyond 